1. Technical Field
The present invention is directed to Internet search engines. More specifically, the present invention is directed to Internet voice-related search engines.
2. Description of the Related Art
Presently, the Internet provides users with visually-based interfaces to service applications. Internet users employ keyboards, pointing devices and other such techniques to interact with Internet applications. Internet applications include for example content searching applications as provided by such companies as Yahoo or Infoseek. Other applications include address or phone number lookups.
Telephone users have difficulty in using Internet applications due to their devices not being adept to interacting with the visually-based interfaces of the Internet applications. For example, cell phone users have relatively small displays within which to view Internet information. To mitigate this problem, voice markup languages have been introduced to make available the services of the Internet to telephone users. One such voice markup language is VoiceXML which permits users to interact with Internet web pages using an audio (i.e., telephone) interface.
An example of a VoiceXML application is a restaurant locating application with which a user can communicate in order to locate a restaurant in a certain city. Such interaction includes asking the user questions, such as the type of restaurant and location. Another VoiceXML application may interact with the user to provide directions to the restaurant. VoiceXML applications typically reside on Internet web sites. Telephony servers act as an interface with the web sites and allow the VoiceXML applications to interact with the user.
Telephony servers require a wide range of voice applications as they are driven by the ever varying service needs of their users. However, locating the specific voice application to fulfill a need of their users in real-time is difficult. For example, a voice application to locate restaurants in Chicago may require one type of speech recognition engine, while another voice application to locate restaurants in San Francisco may require another type.
Since the needs are dynamic and must be satisfied in real-time, telephony servers require a mechanism that can quickly locate the correct voice application. Most telephony servers lack such a mechanism and rely upon “hard-wired” solutions where the telephony servers use only a pre-selected number of voice applications whose operational requirements are known beforehand. Limiting the pool of voice applications to a certain pre-selected number is an undesirable trait of the current telephony approaches.